Here we go for more local sight seeing. We've lived here 10 years and had never been to Sanibel. Everybody knows I'm quite frugal (read cheap) so the fact that one has to pay a $6 toll just to get on the island rankles with me. That might have something to do with it.

But we loaded up the car with our beach gear, paid the toll and over the causeway we went.

First stop was the Ding Dang Gosh Darn Darling Wildlife Refuge. (Ding Darling, really) This is right up my alley for photo opportunities.

Sandpipers? Gulls?

You pay $5 per car and you can drive through the park. It's pretty much just a nice paved road through the backwaters with the occasional open area like this.

We were there at high tide and I understand there is less to see at that time but we still found a few things to amuse us. Mike likes to stick his fingers at things.

We watched this Ibis fishing for crabs for a while.

Pretty bird...

We would stop here and there, get out of the car and wander around.

What!?

Reddish Egret doing some fishing.

Sheepshead fish.

We also saw some dolphin fish but the picture was too dark, backwaters

A tiny little crab and once again Mike has to touch it.

It pinched him.

Toes in Sand! Beach time!

Next we're off to Bowman's Beach for some shelling and swimming. Now Ms. Frugal kicks in again. $3 to park... per HOUR!

The snowbirds have mostly gone home but it's still tourist season so the beach was reasonably busy.

Other than the people watching (German's, it's their season and they like speedo's) the highlight was seeing a few dolphins swim through.

They would come up out of the water and splash their tail on the surface chasing fish.

Cool to watch.

I'm trying to do some shelling but the water was rough.

Not much luck here, lots of tiny broken shells.

So we went to a place called Blind Pass at the very end of Sanibel, right before you go onto Captiva and had much more luck. The beach is covered with shells, wear shoes, ouch!

Mikey doing some shelling.

Selfie on the Beach!

(Now why does that sound dirty? lol)

We had lunch at the Blue Giraffe. I had the Grilled Grouper Kaiser (delicious) and Mike had ... yeah, you guessed it... a burger.

We drove all the way back to the other end of the island to see the Lighthouse and spotted this osprey up in a tree.

Beautiful bird!

And there's the Lighthouse. I don't quite understand the attraction but there it is!

A quick stop at Pinocchio's for a huge waffle ice cream cone (about 14,000 calories) and back over the causeway where we spotted these two wind surfers. We were exhausted and sun-burned. Long day.

Here's our shell collection. Not a whole lot and nothing big but I was being picky. I did find one medium sized nice shell but he was occupied and I had to throw him back.